There
are two messages—one explicit, the other implicit—in
The Corporation, a documentary film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott
and Joel Bakan.

The explicit point is
that if corporations are people, then they are psychopaths. In
the first of the film’s three parts, Achbar & Company adroitly link the
World Health Organization’s symptoms of psychopathology to corporate
behavior.

The film’s tacit
suggestion, however, is that the people who work for them and/or buy into
corporate philosophy—as producers and/or consumers—are also psychopathic, or
at least possess many of the same symptoms (you are what consumes you).

This subtlety, in my
opinion, makes it a more intellectually stimulating film than
Fahrenheit-911. Whereas F-911 limits itself by attending to
the emotions of potential American swing voters and the left-wing faithful,
The Corporation’s imaginedaudience is open-ended, appealing
to honest, hard working people worldwide, many of them corporate employees
or beneficiaries themselves. Since corporations are global entities, the
film focuses on their planetary and species-wide effects, rather than one
nation’s election. And it does this all in a way that allows people to feel
their complicity in failing to resist the rise of totalitarianism in their
societies, people like the pre-Stalinist soviets and Weimar Germans before
us.

In many ways, The
Corporation reveals how decent people permit such inhumane systems.
Which brings us to another irony—it is a more profoundly political film than
F-911. Its implicit message makes it so. In its first part, the film
employs the most commonly used chart by mental health professionals for
diagnosing psychopathy, checking off the symptoms (1) as the mélange of
images and talking heads gradually render the logical verdict.

The corporation, the
right wing economist Milton Friedman tells us, can’t be any more socially
responsible than a building, so asking it to be something it can’t be is
absurd. One can’t expect it to behave in a lawful way or put the common
interests of the public and planet ahead of the private interests of its
financial profiteers. Its primary reason for being is to make them money, it
is legally bound to do so, and it’s the primary law they adhere to.

There’s the master of
urban disguise, Marc Barry, who twenty-somethings might relate to Puck from
MTV’s original The Real World. With at times spiked blond hair, a
goatee and various costumes, this young millionaire proudly makes his way by
stealing information from corporate executives on behalf of their
competitors, and doesn’t feel any guilt about it. It’s just the way the
world is, he says, while stylin’ and profilin’ for the camera.

Carlton Brown is a Wall
Street commodities broker who resembles Charles Barkley. He’s a sharp
dresser, very stylish, and it was the price of gold going up that was on his
mind while he watched the twin towers come tumbling down. He felt nothing
for anybody. Make them a commodity and I’ll pay attention, he said, more
or less.

Then there’s America’s
leading dissident intellectual, Noam Chomsky, telling the camera, “When you
look at a corporation, just like when you look at a slave owner, you want to
distinguish between the institution and the individual [but in good
conscience, you can’t].”

Renowned progressive
author Howard Zinn reminds us, as if we already knew, of course, that
European fascism rose with the help of corporations. Does claiming that one
didn’t know what was going on or that one was just following orders hold up
in the end?

Perhaps most disturbing
is the delusional blather of Michael Walker, president of the
Fraser Institute. Walker waxes poetic, gesticulating with his hands to
the point where, for particular emphasis, he would unconsciously use
masturbatory gestures. Coupled by his gleaming eyes and somewhat flushed,
glowing baldness, one could not escape the profound narcissism informing his
vision of the world. Walker is jovial, nay downright jocular, when he agrees
with the statement that every identifiable particle on earth should be
privately owned and colonized by a corporation to benefit both its plump and
happy workers and, of course, its stockholders…gesticulate.

Naturally, Walker seems
oblivious to the film’s numerous case studies showing not only the already
well-publicized harm to the environment, but also to the physical and mental
health of workers and consumers damaged by corporate inhumanity.

But why and how can a
corporation be considered a “person” and subjected to such an analysis, you
ask? The filmmakers anticipated their audience’s resistance, thankfully,
providing a perhaps too brief sketch of how corporations became
legal persons in the United States.

Basically, corporate
lawyers used the 14th Amendment to the Constitution (2), which
recognized the rights of former slaves to be protected equally under the
laws of the land in order to gain greater power for their business clients.
(3) Equal protection meant that corporations as citizens of the United
States had certain inalienable rights, among them free speech and protection
from search and seizure of their private persons by government agencies
without due process of law. So it didn’t take long for them to take
everything over in the U.S. since they live longer, accumulate far more
wealth and exercise far greater mobility than other types of people,
who also compete with them for life, liberty and happiness.

OK,
one might say, “But that’s just business. It’s economics. What’s it got to
do with politics and my civil liberties? How does that affect me?”

The Corporation addresses these
issues and assumptions by presenting the views of a wide range of people.
You might see yourself somewhere in this film. Philosophers,
corporate executives, Bolivian activists, college students, academics,
farmers, housewives and others are interviewed, revealing through their own
stories, words and actions the insanity that’s killing the world.

For
one who has never thought of our culture’s principal institution this way,
the prospect that their society’s dominant cultural system is psychopathic
and forcing them to become psychopaths themselves by behaving the way they
do, is unnerving.

The
question is, what does one do about it?

First, educate one’s
self. You can begin by checking out all the links below and seeing this
film. I saw the CBC television version. Unfortunately, it’s in very limited
release in the U.S. despite its having won numerous awards, including one at
Sundance. However, you can encourage your local independent theatre owner to
show the film, and get involved by going to The Corporation’s support
site.

Finally, realize that
one can’t bring about the political changes one desires without also
nurturing the equivalent psychological or spiritual changes within one’s
self.

The Corporation serves as something
of an unsentimental mirror image of America’s perception of the world and
its existence. It’s time we help ourselves heal before others intervene for
us.

Peace.

Chuck
Richardson
is editor of
www.niagarabuzz.com. An experienced poet, journalist, newspaper
columnist, produced playwright and award-winning literary critic, he has
just published his first book,
Memos from Apartment 5,
available now from Page Free Press. His writing has appeared on ZNet, The
Smirking Chimp, Buffalo Report, Buffalo Alt Press, Graphic Truth,
corporations-suck.com and JuryFury.com, among others. He can be reached at
Richardson@niagarabuzz.com.NOTES

1.A
callous unconcern for the feelings of others; an incapacity to maintain
enduring relationships; reckless disregard for the safety of others;
deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit; an incapacity
to experience guilt; and failure to conform to social norms with respect to
lawful behavior—Personality Diagnostic Checklist, World Health Organization
ICD-10, Manual of Mental Disorders DSM-IV.
2. In
1868 the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution had become law.
Section 1 of that Amendment states: “All persons born or naturalized in the
United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the
United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or
enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens
of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person
within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” 3. Where
the film could have gone into greater detail? Ever hear of
John Chandler Bancroft Davis? No? Well, he might just be the most
pivotal character in American history, but you won’t read about him in any
high school textbooks. One might say he’s something of an Iago, ostensibly
working for Othello (“the people”) while serving secretive “private”
interests (the “true” political-economic leadership). Born in 1822, Davis
was the son of former Massachusetts Gov. John Davis. Thanks to his family’s
connections, he rose to president of the Newburgh & New York Railroad,
assistant U.S. secretary of state, ambassador to Germany and reporter of the
U.S. Supreme Court. Davis’ pivotal act occurred while reporting Supreme
Court decisions when he authored the headnotes to the infamous
Plessy v. Ferguson case that defined the “separate but equal” doctrine
of racial segregation, and the Southern Pacific Railroad v. Santa Clara
County case in 1886 that defined “corporate
personhood.” Both “decisions” were based on the
14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. Whereas Plessy was
overturned in the 1954
Brown v. Board of Education ruling, the corporate personhood case still
serves as legal precedent and therefore remains the law of the land. Later
courts have, without exception, refused to hear questions regarding the
legality of corporate personhood, preferring instead to build upon the lie
rather than expose it. Corporate personhood, by the way, is the belief (but
legal reality) that corporations have inalienable human rights just like
flesh and blood people. The former railroad president reported in the 1886
headnotes (which are not legally binding, but merely summations) that the
Supreme Court had decided “corporations [were] persons,” but it had ruled no
such thing. The result is that corporate attorneys for 118 years have been
claiming their inhuman clients’ inalienable rights as human beings supported
by a Supreme Court decision that never occurred. How did this happen?
According to William Meyers, author of
The Santa Clara Blues: Corporate Personhood versus Democracy, Davis’
act and the ensuing floodgate of decisions strengthening the false precedent
were emergent from “the power and wealth of the class of people who owned
corporations, and resulted in their even greater power and wealth.” As
everyone knows, the U.S. saw the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the
stealing of Indian land (Manifest Destiny in action), a population and
farming explosion, as well as the Civil War and passage of the 14th
Amendment (and the transition from slavery to wage slavery) during the 19th
Century. Less recognized, however, is the fact that corporations became the
preferred form of doing business, and began to dominate our politics,
economy and culture. After the Civil War, corporations intensified their
efforts to remove government oversight of their operations and began
systematically bribing Congress. Most of the Supreme Court judges appointed
to the bench were former corporate lawyers who had, at their clients’
behest,
concocted the idea of “corporate personhood.” The idea was that if
corporations could get the courts to agree that they were legal persons,
they could assert that the state governments that chartered them would be
constrained from exercising power over them thanks to the 14th
Amendment. This, of course, would give corporations a great deal of leverage
against legal restraint. The 1886 Santa Clara “decision,” a fiction Davis
made real, resulted from a national campaign, and became law without
legislation or a Constitutional amendment. Corporations merely announced to
“we the people” that we held mistaken views about them, if we had any views
at all, and that they had rights just like we did. Meyers, however,
perceives such constitutional rights inverting “the relationship between the
government and corporations. Recognized as persons, corporations lose much
of their status as subjects of the government. Although artificial creations
of their owners and the governments, as legal persons they have a degree of
immunity to government supervision. Endowed with the court-recognized right
to influence both elections and the law-making process,
corporations now dominate not just the U.S. economy, but the government
itself.” We know this and we know it’s wrong, so why don’t we make the
government face the truth? Perhaps we’re not free or brave enough to do so.
More likely is the reality that “corporations” have attained absolute power,
and have found “presidents,” Congresspersons and judges to champion their
“truth” against the larger fact of the “union’s” real state.